New World Reading

This week to follow up on my post about Kobus Moolman, winner of the Glenna Luschei prize, I’m sharing some fine posts about Moolman’s fellow finalists, Joan Metelerkamp and Togara Muzanenhamo, and about contemporary African writing more broadly.

Africa In Words is a blog that covers various forms of African expressive culture, and it’s a wonderful source for up-to-date news about not only literature and publishing but also festivals, music, visual art and more. The blog was started in 2011 by Jenny Greenshields, Kate Haines, Katie Reid, Nara Improta and Victoria Moffatt when they were all completing Ph.D.’s directed by Professor Stephanie Newell at the University of Sussex (now at Yale). Along with the collective behind Africa Is A Country and Ainehi Edoro, founder of Brittle Paper, the Africa In Words team is part of a game-changing shift in how the creative work of African artists circulates. By drawing attention to production and events from regions that are neglected not only by the mainstream media but also by scholarly journals, syllabi, and hiring committees, these sites demonstrate every day how to theorize from the global South.

Last November they published Tom Penfold’s review of Metelerkamp’s eigth collection, Now the World Takes These Breaths, for which she was shortlisted for the Glenna Luschei prize. Penfold sees Metelerkamp as part of a group of South African writers he calls “The Poets of No Sure Place because of the apprehensive and unstable nature of their work. A diverse group, which includes poets as varied as Lesego Rampolokeng, Seitlhamo Motsapi, Angifi Dladla and Mxolisi Nyezwa, they are united in combining the public with the private; juxtaposing the regional, national and international; and in cathartically probing the often controversial nature of South African society.” Africa in Words continues its attention to poetry with Rashi Rohatgi recent review of another project of the African Poetry Book Fund, an annual box set of chapbooks by New Generation African Poets. Her review of the 2015 collection comes in perfect time, as the 2016 collection will be out soon…maybe a Jacket2 reader will want to review the new collection.

In a similar vein, poetry publishers in Africa, as elsewhere, have been returning us to the experience of hearing poetry. The Bulawayo-based publisher ‘Amabooks has posted a rather magical reading by Togara Muzanenhamo (also featured as a finalist for the Glenna Luschei Prize last week) with musical grounding from accordionist Leo Svirsky. The evocative twinning of voice and music evoke the long history of concertina music in Southern Africa, transporting us to a mental landscape “stirring a rhythmic breeze in us…[with] wild stars twisted above” us.

This series offers a peek at some of the exciting things afoot in contemporary African poetry and where to find them. I hope it will be the first of many by other commentators -- in the 21st century it would be a tragedy for "world literature" to ignore the vibrant poetry scene in what is, after all, the home of poetry, the continent where language itself arose. The series borrows its title from an album by the great South African pianist Dollar Brand (now Abdullah Ibrahim). First released in 1974, the album seems a perfect mirror of what’s most exciting about the writing and publishing coming out of Africa (and its recent diasporas) these days. The album opens with Ntsikana’s Bell, a song attributed to a Xhosa figure influential in Africanizing Christianity in the seventeenth century, and the other tracks draw on Swazi and Muslim influences. The album’s hopeful declaration of a present anchored in indigenous histories and honoring diversity resounds through the communities of writers and readers increasingly accessible through internet publishing, new presses, and a variety of audio formats. For lovers of poetry, there is good news from Africa.